The web is a great place to waste, uh, invest one’s spare time, assuming one has any time to spare. YouTube, Facebook, they all have their aficianados, but my cousin Arkee, a retired professor at Tel Aviv University, just alerted me to a totally cool, totally science geek-oriented web site: Trailblazing: Three and a half centuries of Royal Society publishing.
It’s simple to use. You zoom along the time line, click on a year, and see what pops up. Not only do you get beautiful images and well-written explanations about amazing scientific trivia (do you know what kind of animal blood was used in the first blood transfusion?), you also get links to the original Royal Society publications. The following abstract was written by Isaac Newton himself (click on it to expand the image).
